Jim Gray's Advice for Authors of Rejected Conference Papers

Jim Gray was a pioneer in database systems and Turing award winner, but he was also a truly nice guy who went out of his way to support other researchers. When I was working at Microsoft Research, I wrote him email complaining about a paper being rejected, and got this reply from him:

From: Jim Gray
Sent: Tuesday, July 04, 2000 1:51 AM
To: Jim Larus
Cc: Michael Parkes Subject:
RE: Visit?

well, the <omitted> paper is in good company (and for the same reason).
The B-tree paper was rejected at first.
The Transaction paper was rejected at first.
The data cube paper was rejected at first.
The five minute rule paper was rejected at first.
But linear extensions of previous work get accepted.
So, resubmit! PLEASE!!!

We did, and the paper was published. But, I value Jim's response more highly than the paper, and since then I have added to his list. My favorite is that Tim Berners-Lee's paper on the World-Wide Web was rejected as a full paper at Hypermedia '91 and presented as a poster. I would love to know what the members of the PC think of that decision? Do they even list membership on that PC on their CVs?